• Strine Sports - Unknown Nichigo

    Willow Worlds

    Cricket is one of the few things I really miss about life in Australia, and stumbling across the Japan Cricket Association website recently led me down a rabbit hole centered around willow, an integral yet often unremembered part of life in my two countries. Come down the willow wormhole with me! Cricket is booming in Japan. Looking at the website, I was surprised to see how much the game of cricket has developed since I was last in touch with it in around 2007 or so. There are associations in every region of the country, 100 senior teams and about…

  • Daily Life - Unknown Nichigo

    Tokyo’s Wonderfully Whirled With Aus

    Walking around central Tokyo over a couple of days this week, I got to discover a pocket garden filled with Aussie plants, including blooming grevillea and kangaroo paw. This little circular garden created a wonderful whirled of Aus, right in the Marunouchi business district. Flowers weren’t the only wonderful sights of the city. Walking around gifted me plenty of wonderful sights to see. Related posts: Paws for Effect Paws and Reflect Get Your ‘Thinking’ Paws From Me, A Damned, Dirty Mate! AFL – Modern Australia’s Religion and Failed Proselytizing in Japan With 10 Thumbs, Odds Were Always For 1 Being…

  • Unknown Nichigo

    Do Little

    Blessed with a bit of time and being in close proximity, I used the beautiful weather to visit Tama Zoological Park, testing a new Nikon Z 50 camera. I first visited this zoo in 1993, at a time when the memory of the 1984 arrival of koalas was still fresh. Koalas were flavor of the month in Japan at the time, literally so in the case of Koala no March–a confectionary that remains popular to this day–and the zoo’s Australian Habitat was something of a showcase area. Now, it’s just one of many habitats in what is a delightful little…

  • Unknown Nichigo

    Avian Flew

    I got to make a flying visit to the “Bird” exhibition held at the National Museum of Nature and Science. The exhibition traced birds’ roles in ecosystems, dating from their evolution from dinosaurs through to the important roles they play today. There were over 600 bird specimins exhibited, divided into displays based on themes largely decided by avian type. The exibition boasted of providing a new look at birds through a genetic analysis. These were some of the aspects of the exhibition that were good to like. Other areas were not so great. Despite being a weekday and the entrance…

  • Unknown Nichigo

    Frills Attached: When Japan Went Ape Over An Aussie Lizard

    Way back in the early 1980s, Australia went from barely being a blip on the average Japanese radar to capturing the nation’s attention thanks to the frill-necked lizard, an endemic Australian reptile that uses its frill to threaten or frighten off predators. The lizard was featured in a March 1984 episode of Waku Waku Dobutsu Land (Exciting Animal Land), a popular TV show in those days when limited information meant news spread more broadly than now. The program offered a frill-necked lizard plush toy to six lucky viewers drawn from a lottery. More than 700,000 entries were received. Then, Mitsubishi…

  • Unknown Nichigo

    Totoro In My Neighborhood

    I had no idea until yesterday, but for years I have been living quite close to Totoro, a Shinto kami made globally famous through Hayao Miyazaki‘s utterly delightful 1988 animated movie, My Neighbor Totoro. OK, so it’s not the real forest-protecting spirit as depicted by STUDIO GHIBLI, but the topiary sculpture is wonderful. It’s a work that I’m pretty sure is unauthorized by Suzaki, a gardening company in the Tokyo suburb of Kokubunji. A cycling buddy posted photos of Totoro on social media yesterday, and with only a couple of pre-dawn hours available for anything today due to home requirements,…

  • Daily Life - Unknown Nichigo

    Green Godzilla

    On what was something of a strange weekend, perhaps the weirdest moment came when I got to come face-to-face with a green, as in made of plants, Godzilla. There’re plenty of Godzilla statues and effigies all over Tokyo, as I’ve reported before, and the rest of Japan, some life-sized, others tiny and plenty in-between and loving devoted to Japan’s most adored monster. In western Tokyo, where I live, the most famous example is probably the Godzilla statue outside the TOHO CO., LTD. studios near Seijogakuen-mae, which is a bit of a trip for me further out in the boonies. So,…

  • Daily Life - Unknown Nichigo

    Wings of Desire

    At Mrs. Kangaeroo’s whim, we headed off to the nearby U.S. Air Force Yokota Air Base to “enjoy” its Friendship Festival where it opens its gates to the general public and gives them a glimpse of what goes on behind its barbed wire. The huge crowds reminded me of how much so many Japanese adore the United States. It was my first visit to the Friendship Festival almost 30 years and things have changed significantly. We needed to line up for more than an hour in a queue more than a kilometer long to get in, then spent another hour…

  • Unknown Nichigo

    Zenshoen, A Story Of Cruel Tragedy

    All sorts of memories flooded back to me during a brief ride through Tama Zenshoen, a gorgeous park in outer western Tokyo, but also home to a tragic and cruel past for Japan’s Hansen’s disease patients. Zenshoen is a leprosarium and for most of its history, the 115-year-old facility was shut off from the rest of the world and its inhabitants quarantined inside, sterilized and forbidden from associating with the outside world, largely based on 1951 testimony to the Diet by Kensuke Mitsuda, a staunch segregationist but also unfortunately Japan’s foremost expert on leprosy at the time. This continued for…

  • Unknown Nichigo

    Own Your Own Japanese Castle for $100,000

    Aussies can buy an (almost) authentic Japanese castle for only about $100,000, it has been revealed recently on social media. Century21 Japan is selling the 6-story castle (with a restaurant on the second floor) in Akabira, Hokkaido, at a price unimaginable to potential home buyers Down Under. Of course, at that price, there’s bound to be a few catches, but perhaps not as many as some may think, especially considering it comes with a huge garden (over 5,000 m2), a working elevator, restaurant, more than 40 parking spaces and connection to sewage and water mains. Located in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost…